Making Kinship in Switzerland and Beyond: Imaginations and Substances

Abstract

This special issue deals with the making of kinship through medical, political, affective, and legal technologies. While this primarily refers to the creation of kinship through medically assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization or gamete donation, it also includes further techniques of making kinship such as marriages, the establishment of so-called ‘donor siblingship’, and more general ways of creating belonging and an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991 [1983]). We understand technology as a device which assists the making of kinship that is situated in political, legal, and affective spheres and which therefore should be understood in a much broader way than just referring to the biotechnological manipulation of body substances. The term assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) refers to the technological means of manipulating gametes in order to conceive a child. Probably the best known of these techniques is the so-called ‘in vitro’ (Latin: ‘in glass’) fertilization or IVF. By isolating reproductive substance from the human body and enabling its cultivation in a petri dish, ‘IVF has changed scientific understandings of what life is’ (Franklin 2013 referring to Maienschein 2003) but also of what kinship is. In contemporary Euro-American thinking 1 , kinship is considered as the domain that is based on the ‘natural facts of life’ (Strathern 1992) – such as sex difference, generational succession, pregnancy and birth. Therefore, by intervening at the core of the making of a new life by dividing reproduction from sexual intercourse and taking it out of the human